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Space cubed: Dawn of the nano-sats

Can't afford a Curiosity? Fleets of tiny, cube-shaped spacecraft modules could provide a cheaper ticket to explore the cosmos

By Maggie McKee

I AM here to glimpse the future of spaceflight. I vaguely expect gleaming clean rooms and labs, and to be asked to don overalls – or at the very least safety goggles – to view cutting-edge robotic probes destined to spy out Earth-like planets, or fan out across the solar system in search of life. This is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after all.

Instead, I’m ushered into a narrow, drab office whose main decoration is a signed photograph of astronomer and TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson. My host, doctoral student Mary Knapp, points towards a table on which a model of her spacecraft is sitting. A metal box about the size of a loaf of bread, it has an 85-millimetre-wide Zeiss camera lens peeking from one end. “It’s a very nice lens, but it’s not exotic in any way,” she says.

I nod in what I hope is an enthusiastic manner, and mentally remove my safety goggles. But the more Knapp and her colleague Rebecca Jensen-Clem talk, the more I genuinely get excited. The past few years have been gloomy for space exploration, with missions seemingly more often in the news for having their funding cut than blasting off successfully.

But tiny modules of the kind I see before me are promising to change all that. Known as CubeSats, these standardised packages can be sent up into space individually or mixed and matched to make bigger missions. They might provide cheap tickets to the hotspots of Mars or the icy beltways of Saturn, and not just for the likes of NASA, but university research groups, poorer nations …